Once a website is in production / published / “Live” and being visited by the public we are probably still making changes or adding functionality. So that we can try out new things without interrupting the visitors to the Live site we have a “Test” version of the site. (Sometimes we may have even more versions of the site. Depending on the perceived purpose of these extra versions they may be called “the Dev site,” “Staging” or “Qual.”)
Generally, the COFA Web team will ask you to review and approve new functionality on the Test site before we move it to the Live site. Note that before moving our code edits to the Test site, the Developers generally perform the edits on a “Local” version of the site, which is usually on their individual laptop computers.
To access the Test site: We try to keep the path to the site as similar to the Live site as possible, something like: https://test.root.utexas.edu.
The part of the URL after this root part is the same as the Live site. You log in the same and all other paths are the same, as long as the following is true:
To make the Test site mirror the Live site we “synch” it up. In other words, we manually override the Test site with the content, database, and code from the Live site on a regular basis. Usually, when we’re getting ready to work on or release code. If it hasn’t been synched up recently then, newer pages and images could be missing.
You are encouraged to try out new content, menu organizations, complex layouts or other features on the Test site. However, before doing so be aware of when the next time the Test site will be synched with the Live site or your edits may be lost when that synch process happens. Please just let us know if you have anything in progress on the Test site that you do not want to lose.
In summary, the only meaningful ways that the Test site is different from the Live site are:
- the “root” part of the URL address,
- the fact that it is not findable on search engines, and
- that we have to manually re-synch it up to the Live site.
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